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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • That’s what I do. I have an LG OLED from 6-7 years ago and I have no idea what the UI looks like. But to be fair this is only because I don’t watch traditional TV at all. It’s just an Apple TV for most streaming services and a Mac Mini for some other things like adblocked youtube (with one of those cheap gyro mouse and keyboard bluetooth remotes). I guess I wouldn’t have to use the satellite TV though, I could get iptv via my fibre isp too, but that’d cost money.

    The Mac is not good at supporting CEC other than switching source when it wakes up, but even that’s not an issue because I can still use the Apple TV remote to control volume even when something else is the active source. Speaking of volume, my setup also includes a Samsung sound bar which also has a remote that I never actually have to use. Everything mostly just works.











  • That’s funny because I grew up with math teachers constantly telling us that we shouldn’t trust them.

    Normal calculators that don’t have arbitrary precision have all the same problems you get when you use floating point types in a programming language. E.g. 0.1+0.2==0.3 evaluates to false in many languages. Or how adding very small numbers to very large numbers might result in the larger number as is.

    If you’ve only used CAS calculators or similar you might not have seen these too since those often do arbitrary precision arithmetics, but the vast majority of calculators is not like that. They might have more precision than a 32 bit float though.



  • What bothers me the most is the amount of tech debt it adds by using outdated approaches.

    For example, recently I used AI to create some python scripts that use polars and altair to parse some data and draw charts. It kept insisting to bring in pandas so it could convert the polars dataframes to pandas dataframes just for passing them to altair. When I told if that altair can use polars dataframes directly, that helped, but two or three prompts later it would try to solve problems by adding the conversion again.

    This makes sense too, because the training material, on average, is probably older than the change that enabled altair to use polars dataframes directly. And a lot of code out there just only uses pandas in the first place.

    The result is that in all these cases, someone who doesn’t know this would probably be impressed that the scripts worked, and just not notice the extra tech debt from that unnecessary dependency on pandas.

    It sounds like it’s not a big deal, but these things add up and eventually, our AI enhanced code bases will be full of additional dependencies, deprecated APIs, unnecessarily verbose or complicated code, etc.

    I feel like this is one aspect that gets overlooked a bit when we talk about productivity gains. We don’t necessarily immediately realize how much of that extra LoC/time goes into outdated code and old fashioned verbosity. But it will eventually come back to bite us.


  • I have to do a bunch of relatively unsurmountable steps to do what should’ve taken half a minute. Like screenshot the profile and scrape the text with iOS Photos text recognition.

    The iOS workaround isn’t quite as unsurmountable as you don’t have to go through the Photos app at all. You can enter text selection mode directly from the screenshot without even saving it or leaving the app you’re in. And since iOS will look up any word you can select in the system dictionary and also translate any text you can select, you can do these things right there too.

    That said I did once make a shortcut that lets me triple tap the back of my phone to pop up a text version of everything on screen that the iOS OCR detects. Not sure what I did that for though, I don’t really use it.